This research explores alternative healing belief-systems of middle-class adherents from a sociology-of-knowledge perspective. Alternative healing belief-systems are those paradigms of knowledge and practice which compete with the dominant medical belief-system in this culture. Alternative healing among middle-class persons includes, for example, faith healing, psychic healing, naturopathy, chiropractic, and meditation. The sociology of knowledge approach emphasizes that the researcher needs to discover what are the basic conceptions (e.g., of health, illness, healing) used by adherents of alternative healing, and to understand what is meaningful about their alternative practices to adherents themselves. This perspective also locates the beliefs and practices within their social setting, uncovering the social supports of alternative health beliefs and practices. It is useful to distinguish between "disease" (a biological disorder) and "illness" (the way the ill person experiences his/her disorder, in a given social and cultural context), because alternative healing appears to address the latter primarily, whereas the dominant medical system addresses the former. Sociological methods are particularly well-suited to a study of treatment of illness (as opposed to disease). The methods to be used are qualitative, descriptive, and hypothesis-generating. The research will identify as many alternative healers/groups as possible in a suburban area of New Jersey. Background information will be obtained from interviews of healers/leaders, literature of the groups, field observations. Several groups/healers will be selected for intensive study, by extended participant-observation and open-ended interviews. The data should result in (a) useful interpretive ethnographies of the units studied, and (b) generation of hypotheses and interpretive categories for adequately framing a quantitative study of these phenomena. The existence and nature of middle-class alternative healing has implications for health policy, training of health professionals, and an understanding of the health-related needs of middle-class persons.